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Review Summary

The story and its players look different in the latest screen iteration of “Dangerous Liaisons,” but the venomous passions remain repellently, seductively familiar. Bankrolled by Chinese money and directed by a South Korean filmmaker, Jin-ho Hur, this Chinese-language version of the 18th-century French novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos opens in Shanghai in 1931, when the city was known as the Paris of the Orient. (Now it’s just the center of the world.) That year a fighting-trim Mao Zedong helped create the Chinese Soviet Republic, and Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria, setting up a puppet government. The second Sino-Japanese war was six years away. — Manohla Dargis